She got off her swivel office chair, yet barely increased in height: one of those wide-bodied, short-legged women with a spreading bosom that guaranteed a certain amount of personal distance. She came into the corridor and gave Theo cheerful directions, pointing through a large window into the sunlit grounds. 'You're very welcome,' she said when he thanked her. There was something childlike about her, not a lack of maturity, or understanding, perhaps just the way she had to lift her face up to him. Theo couldn't imagine her vigilantly keeping a record of Mrs Bell's visitors for the law, but rather saw her involved in neighbourly domesticity — at a barbecue with home-made chutneys and stocky kids bouncing on a trampoline.
Despite her guidance Theo lost his way and hoped she didn't see him consult a lugubrious man in a walking frame. The population of the Malahide Home moved with caution, with difficulty, or both. Theo found himself repressing his own agility in case it became a superiority too apparent. In the small-town summer the staff didn't bother with uniforms, but there was a man about Theo's age at the entrance to full care, so he assumed him to be an employee. He was talking with three women whom old age had reduced to a sisterly uniformity of stick limbs, forward curvature, anemone mouths and hair as lifeless as that of dolls. They stood, absolutely silent, while the carer gave Theo final directions to Mrs Bell's room. 'I'm afraid you can't expect a great deal of recognition,' the man said. He wasn't to know that aspect of her affliction was a comfort for Theo.
The room was more a cubicle, though with bright colours and a window view of a pebble garden courtyard with lots of empty seats, and frogs and lizards petrified among the cacti. One high, narrow bed and one chair. One bedside table and one silver-framed photograph of a young woman in a dress no longer in fashion. Mrs Bell on the rise, Theo assumed. It had the emotional ambiguity that all such photographs have — on one hand the proof of vivacious youth, on the other the sadness of embalmment. We are gone, silent, dispossessed, is the message seen on all the faces. The more permanent the photographic record, the greater the sense of life's transience.
Penny's mother hadn't answered his tap on the door, or his false and cousinly introduction as he sat down in the one chair. She was a sister to the women clustered at the unit entrance: He could see nothing of Penny in her appearance whatsoever. She half sat, half lay back, clasped within the bulky fabric arms of one of those convalescent pillows.
'So how have you been keeping, Mrs Bell?' Her eyes slid past him almost with disdain. 'Penny sends love,' he said conspiratorially, but there was no catch in her even breathing. 'She'd like to come herself and bring Ben, but you know what the circumstances are.' He realised she didn't, of course: she had no idea what the circumstances were. 'Well anyway,' he said, 'they seem to look after you well here. It's a bigger place than I thought.' He tried to think of the information Penny would find most comforting from the visit. Her mother's doll-like hair looked tidy, the bedjacket was clean, the room also. No outward signs of neglect, or distress; no access to the inner world. There were no flowers, and Theo wished he'd brought some.
Mrs Bell gave a sigh from time to time, not of any heartfelt sorrow, but as if expressing some slight exasperation. 'I'd better be on my way,' Theo said. 'I'll be able to tell Penny you're fine. That old church pew is still there at the back door of the bach, you know.' He could think of no reason for giving such trivial information, except that it was something they both knew. 'Is there anything you want me to pass on to her?' No reply, and although her eyes met his, there was only a mild enquiry there. She had some longish hairs on her lower face, like the whiskers on the soft lip of a horse, and her loosely knuckled hands showed a deep, multi-hued pattern of veins and arteries in semitranslucent tissue.
How little distinction there seemed between the internal and outside scene, both bright, hot, immobile, with Penny's mother almost as generic and indifferent as the lizards and frogs of the courtyard. Theo half expected the arrival of a nurse, or a gardener, to check up on him, but he exaggerated the interest in his petty espionage. No one came, no one challenged him as he walked back through the corridors and then the grounds of the Malahide Home, and the sweat that stuck his shirt to his back was induced by heat alone, not suspense. The temperature inside the car was even greater, though he hadn't quite wound up the windows. He opened two of the doors and stood there in the carpark for a while, flexing his muscles. Despite the heat he wished he had his running gear, so that he could set off and prove his body still a willing mule for the mind within. Isn't it our secret belief that senility is a form of contagion: that its sufferers are best kept in quarantine? Old age never comes alone, his grandfather Esler used to say. What could he tell Penny in his email except that her mother was kept clean, the room had therapeutic blue and yellow on its walls, there was that one photograph of her as a young woman: that she was alive. But of course you haven't completely grown up until you realise that death is not the worst thing that can happen.
It was late before Theo reached home. The email he sent to Penny in paradise read — 'Your mother is well cared for so put your mind at rest about that. I had no trouble getting in to see her, and wasn't quizzed in any way. Enjoyed the time with you today and I'll keep in touch.'
It was fundamentally inadequate. But even to her face, especially to her face, Theo couldn't have said that he wished he was still at Drybread in her direct gaze, still seeing her slim hand stroking the hair forward on her son's head, aware of her full thigh beneath the denim.
There was a strength and resilience to her, but also a contained hurt and bewilderment. Theo had only platitudes and a knowledge of print media to offer her when he wished for a consolation which would be swiftly practical, but also have some nobility of compassionate understanding.
8
Theo had nothing to do with art history before he met Stella. Afterwards it still seemed to him a rather peculiar field. He had tried to get interested, but found it a disembodied discipline. Stella didn't practise art of any kind: there were no studios, kilns, canvases, brushes, cutting tools, chemically vivid concoctions, beaten copper, strung looms or closely grained timber, no rich odours of creation and no debris. Just books full of commentary and rumination, with illustrations of the works that inspired them. And the academic journals with articles of intense and lengthy focus on increasingly specialised aspects of other people's work: people spiralling in as if they could not only see the world in a grain of sand, but live there.
Stella contributed articles. During the time they were talking of divorce, she was working on the influence of traditional Aboriginal art on Australian faux primitivism at the end of the twentieth century. Sometimes, as Theo stood at her shoulder by the desk, in the laundry they had converted into her study, he would look at the reproductions of Howellenson and Picoutt as they argued about her refusal to shift when he got the Wellington job offer, or the lack of work he did around the house. 'You think I like cleaning toilets, and coming home to think of a meal every day?' she'd say. They were always civilised, these discussions, carried on without abuse, or raised voices, but with a painful disregard for feelings nevertheless. Maybe there was something of transference of discomfort: those works of art which were Stella's focus, flat in his gaze as they talked in quiet tones of controlled personal disappointment.
Theo knew that some friends, and more acquaintances, thought the marriage failed because they didn't have any children after twelve years. People can't resist a little complacent interpretation at such times, and that must be borne along with all the other bewilderments. But rather than childlessness being the cause, it was more likely a consequence. At first their careers were the given reason for the precautions Stella took, but then came a mutual unease at the prospects a child would have. They never talked about it, never came clean about the sense of separateness that grew between them, when the hope had been a growing closeness and understanding.
It's absurd that you don't discuss something so essential, but common nevertheless, despite the absurdity.
The risk is too great: too much turns on the outcome, in the same way that a man with an obscure and certain sense of illness refuses to get any medical opinion. It's better to talk of trivial practicalities, better to discuss other people's lives rather than your own.
Anyway, no children and nothing between them that wasn't divisible. Everything they had made together could be separated: house sold, assets apportioned. Like so much, however, that was only partly true. There remained twelve years of a shared life — ribs which can be split at the front, but remain connected to the backbone.
When Theo thought of Stella, she was at her laundry desk, or eating. Both characteristic recollections. Although quite slim, she was always snacking on something — a piece of toast and lime and orange marmalade, half a muffin, a sliver of carrot, a plain wine biscuit, a nub of cheese, mandarin segments, maybe one of those fruit and bran twist things in foil. She would wander through the house eating, or come out to the car, chewing, with other things on her mind. Yet seated at a table with a meal as the priority, she had little appetite. 'Not as much as that,' she'd say. 'I'm passing on the meat today', or 'I've done just the one for you'. She would sit patiently during the time it took Theo to finish a full meal, talking a little of the trivial politics of the university department, or of the plans for the barbecue area.
No, no children, although occasionally Theo found himself turning over names in his mind. Journalists need to get the name right: they recognise the importance of names and their pedigree. Hector is a name with a grand, sad history. It is one of the names he might have given a son, but perhaps it would have been an imposition. Theo could imagine the boy being disgruntled, and then, after Theo had told the story of the Trojans and Achaeans, becoming enthusiastic about bearing the name of Hector.
For some time after they sold the house, Theo continued to feel a certain amount of proprietorial responsibility. There was a birch tree that overhung the front bedroom and clogged the spouting there if you didn't get up with the ladder three or four times a year. Driving past, he saw that the new owners had neglected to do that, and the water had backed up and flowed down the wall enough times to encourage a green stain on the roughcast. At first he felt the itch to fix the problem, or go in and instruct the new people, then he became accustomed to it not being part of his responsibility. For Stella too, he experienced a sense of obligation that waned only gradually. He knew she'd struggle with her tax return, but resisted the idea of offering to do it, and rang with the name of an accountant. He sent a card for her first birthday following the divorce, and the first Christmas. He rang when her father became seriously ill, and later warned her of a virulent new computer virus when the IT guy at the paper got wind of it. Each of these contacts was negotiated with civility, but was buffeting all the same, at least for Theo. Afterwards he would be for a time emotionally stunned. It was bewildering that small changes of direction could in the end bring you to an unsought destination. He still had dreams in which his marriage was accepted and familiar fact, and woke to find it was his real life that seemed imagination.
After the divorce, the recollections of good times shared gained in lustre and significance, and the issues that had led to separation became increasingly insubstantial. It was the natural sentimentalism of a parting, Theo told himself, and not proof they'd made the wrong decision, yet how powerful sometimes was the evidence from their shared past. Theo remembered Stella's surprise gift to him when he'd been awarded the Wintermann Journalism Fellowship, which took them to London for six months. She led him to a narrow shop in Kings Cross, and insisted he try on the long coats of Italian leather that were top of the range there. Despite his protests at the cost, she bought for him a shin-length, belted black coat, the leather of which was soft as a flannel and as finely wrinkled as the face of an ageing duchess. Stella called it his French gangster's coat, and Theo would wear it as they went sightseeing in London. They would clasp their hands within the pocket of the coat and squeeze their fingers together in a sign of intimacy and happiness as they walked. The coat ended up at the far end of Theo's wardrobe: too opulent to wear, he might have said, yet knowing its real failing was as witness to a lost time of happiness.
Only once after their divorce did Theo meet Stella with another man, although of course she had male friends. Theo had been to the Coast for yet another story on disputed mining rights, and came back over Arthur's Pass on a hot, Canterbury afternoon, and stopped at the Darfield pub for a drink. Stella and a tall guy with a lot of floppy hair were at an outside table. Theo stood by them briefly and talked. They also had been on the Coast for several days. She introduced him without detail, and the guy said that, as a lawyer, he had a bit to do with forestry and mining issues. He would be interested to read Theo's articles. Theo stood, and they sat, which made a demarcation plain between them. She was eating more substantially than he remembered. How many times he'd sat beside her to constitute a couple, and they had talked to someone outside that partnership, and now he was the one excluded, passing by.
It was almost a physical dislocation, worst when Theo left them. To walk to his car, to drive away without waving, and see them talking together, caused a mixture of sadness and anger. Logic is powerless against habitual things, and failure is debilitating. Maybe she told the floppy-haired guy a bit more about Theo. He's my ex, she might say. It didn't work out. He's never fully grown up in some ways.
Maybe they had more personal things to talk about. Theo and Stella had needed to part; they had agreed to part, but life seeks continuity, and an end to love's endeavour is always painful.
9
Nicholas and Theo went to a Thai restaurant together once a week or so if it suited. Nicholas said Thai cooking had less sodium something or other than Chinese cooking did. The chemistry of the meal didn't interest Theo. What he did like was that the Thai place was BYO, with a moderate corkage charge. Theo knew that journalists have a reputation for meanness, but being ripped off went against his professional pride. At Thai Hai Nicholas and Theo could bring a decent cab merlot, and not have to pay $35.
Nicholas was forty-six. Theo had been to most birthdays he'd had in the last decade or so, several of them in the Thai Hai where they were sitting, a couple of the earlier ones at his home when Nicholas was still with Trish. For some years he taught journalism at the university, but had then come back to the paper. He said he'd given up the varsity work because of the temptation of young women there, the disclosure of the loose tops as they bent over their notes, their willingness to be educated. Too many tar-babies, he'd say: far too much entanglement. The real reason was that he was by disposition a journalist, not a teacher, and couldn't be happy without the investigative challenge. For the same reason, Nicholas had turned down offers of promotion. He was iconoclastic, and reluctant to have any responsibility for other people. His talent and seniority were recognised by the title of deputy chief reporter, but the leadership he gave was by way of his stories, not administration or pastoral care.
Nicholas seemed to wish he was doing the Maine-King story. 'What does she look like?' he said.
'I've told you.'
'You're not screwing her, are you?' he said. 'Keep yourself clear of that while you handle the story. Women are tarbabies, you know that.' The tables were close together in Thai Hai, and at his enquiry a small, overdressed woman stared across at them. It seemed to Theo a warning, rather than embarrassment expressed, but Nicholas lifted his porcelain soup spoon in salute to her and went on. 'You won't be able to handle it, you know, mixing work and your sex life. And anyway, you've got Melanie to consider.'
'We're friends.'
'Yes, but you're screwing her, aren't you?'
'Oh, shut up about it,' Theo said. The small woman looked at him, almost approvingly he thought.
Nicholas was both right and wrong about Melanie, and Theo wasn't going to explain that over a meal at the Thai Hai. Melanie and he were friends, and because they were both journalists, they could unload on each other knowing the
y would be understood. They did make love, but not often, and although on those occasions she was an active participant, Theo knew it was more for his sake than any great need she felt. It was the quid pro quo of such friendships, though never talked about as such.
'Anyway,' said Nicholas, 'tell me about this new Family Law Act and what difference it's going to make in your Maine-King case.'
'Not a hell of a lot, I imagine. I ploughed through some of it and then gave up. Zack Heywood says the main changes are procedural, making the sittings more open to other parties, that sort of stuff.'
'Heywood's shit hot I'm told.'
'One quite important thing is that the court's been given greater powers to enforce its orders. Maybe that's going to make it more difficult for Penny.'
'I'll have extra steamed rice and some of that sweet and sour,' Nicholas told the waitress. He enjoyed his food. 'Heywood acted for the council when that building assents guy took a personal grievance case for wrongful dismissal.' You could categorise Nicholas as crass and lacking concern for others, but you'd be wrong. His often disconcerting directness was not an entirely true representation. He vacuumed up information, and recalled it, with impressive ease. He took nothing at face value. As they went on to talk more about family law and Zack, Theo knew that long after the conversation Nicholas would retain the useful bones of it. 'Two years ago I interviewed one of the founders of that group set up by men who considered they were discriminated against by the Family Court,' said Nicholas. 'He was an angry, disappointed guy all right. Does the new law address that issue?'
'I'm not sure.'
'Like Dr Johnson he wasn't a fastidious man about his linen. The inside of his shirt collar had a ring of grime like candle smudge.'
Drybread: A Novel Page 6